How To Lose A Country: Seven Steps from Democracy To Dictatorship

“How to Lose a Country” is a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. Award-winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran identifies the early warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world from Eastern Europe to South America, in order to arm the reader with the tools to recognize it and take action. Weaving memoir, history and clear-sighted argument, Temelkuran proposes alternative answers to the pressing – and too often paralyzing – political questions of our time. How to Lose a Country is an exploration of the insidious ideas at the core of these movements and an urgent, eloquent defense of democracy.

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist, a political thinker and a public speaker whose work has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, La Stampa, New Statesman and Der Spiegel, among several international media outlets. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots and the Ambassador of New Europe Award for her book Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. Her most recent book, Together, was shortlisted for the Terzani Award in Italy. She has twice been recognized as Turkey’s most read political columnist. Razia Iqbal is John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor at Princeton University’s School for Public and International Affairs. For the last three decades, she worked at the BBC, most recently anchoring Newshour, the current affairs program with 12.5 million listeners in the U.S. and millions more elsewhere. Iqbal has presented the in-depth interview series Witness History, Talking Books and Dream Builders as well as documentaries for both radio and TV. She is a frequent moderator at political and literary events.

This event is cosponsored by the Humanities Council, Princeton Writing Program, Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of German, the Center for Collaborative History, Program in European Cultural Studies, IHUM, and Program in Law and Normative Thinking,